Peter Cheyne

‘PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas’ as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge’s prose writings to be ‘the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers’. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls ‘the spiritual platonic old England’, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries.
This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge’s theories of imagination and the ‘Ideas of Reason’ in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout published works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas.
Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The book also illuminates Coleridge’s prose by analysis of his poetry, notably the ‘Limbo’ sequence. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

In his philosophical writings, Coleridge increasingly developed his thinking about imagination, a symbolizing precursor to contemplation, to a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of ‘Reason’.

Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the ‘dark fluxion’ pursued but ultimately ‘unfixable by thought’, and his extensive range of interests make essential an approach that is philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary.

This is the first collection of essays to be written mainly by philosophers and intellectual historians on Coleridge’s mature philosophy. With a foreword by Baroness Mary Warnock, and original essays on Coleridge and Contemplation by prominent philosophers such as Sir Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, and Andy Hamilton, this volume provides a stimulating collection of insights and explorations into what Britain’s foremost philosopher-poet had to say about the contemplation that he considered to be the highest of the human mental powers.

The essays by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other essays, from intellectual historians and theologians, clarify the historical background, and ‘religious musings’, of Coleridge’s thought regarding contemplation.

This chapter publishes in book form my article of the same title in The Journal of Scottish Thought, 10.1 (2019).

Abstract

Without imagination,  Ronald Hepburn argued, we cannot move from our ordinary concerns in their familiar, transient setting, to thoughts ‘on a cosmic scale and with a cosmos-transcending being’.  Whether through icons, metaphors, or symbols, imagination is in this view a necessary power for the life – and not merely for the discourse – of religion and religious experience. Yet this very strength as a mode of relating to the transcendent, a mode that sees in and through surroundings – thereby gaining an elevated, symbolic significance – is also the root of what makes imagination a liability, being ‘too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation’. Centred around a first-personal account of religious experience, this article steers between the Scylla of constructivist scepticism and the Charybdis of interpretive charity and outlines a three-stage method that brackets doctrine from the account to lessen the tangles of interpretation. I argue that this method illuminates what Karl Jaspers calls the 'immanent transcendent'.

Concerning the philosophical understanding of rhythm, I critically engage Christopher Hasty’s theory, which I present as too radically distinguishing a subjective from an objective conception of rhythm. A confusion is shown to arise from Hasty’s definition of subjective rhythm, and I propose that this confusion can be resolved by conceiving of subjective rhythm not as a different kind of rhythm altogether from the objective sense, as Hasty argues, but rather as the subjective sense of objective rhythm. I argue, then, not for the primacy of subjective over objective rhythm, but for their co-generation in the act of composition or improvisation.

This introductory chapter commences with (1) a definition of contemplation as the sustained attention to the ideas of reason, which are not merely concepts in the mind, but real and external powers that constitute and order being and value, and therefore excite reverence or admiration. (2) A contemplative, Coleridgean position is then outlined as a defence in the crisis of the humanities, arguing that if Coleridge is right in asserting that ideas ‘in fact constitute . . . humanity’, then they must be the proper or ultimate studies of the disciplines that comprise the humanities. (3) This focus on contemplation as the access to essential ideas is shown to explain why Coleridge progressed from, without ever abandoning, imagination to reason as his thought continued to develop, ever evolving through his life. After (4) a further section on ‘Contemplation: How to get There from Here’, the introductory chapter concludes with (5) a descriptive bibliography of Coleridge as discussed by philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, and philosophically minded literary scholars.

This essay discusses Coleridge’s ‘Order of the Mental Powers’ (OMP) in the context of what he identifies as the energic–energetic distinction. The OMP diagram is used to show Coleridge as a two-levels theorist, with the higher and lower levels capable of participation across a fundamental difference. Coleridge is thus a thinker communicating the dynamics of thought within an overarching concern for the ‘energies of Reason’. The restless, flowing, and challenging quality of his writings is therefore balanced by, and subordinated to, the higher level of intellection that he held as a spiritual conatus straining towards ultimate ends and meaningful values. In this two-level theory, energetic desire, pleasure, psychological forces of association, and the ‘mechanical’ understanding operate more naturally on the lower level, while the higher understanding, imagination, and ‘Positive Reason’ work within the enérgeia of free will in the higher mind.

Without imagination,  Ronald Hepburn argued, we cannot move from our ordinary concerns in their familiar, transient setting, to thoughts ‘on a cosmic scale and with a cosmos-transcending being’.  Whether through icons, metaphors, or symbols, imagination is in this view a necessary power for the life – and not merely for the discourse – of religion and religious experience. Yet this very strength as a mode of relating to the transcendent, a mode that sees in and through surroundings – thereby gaining an elevated, symbolic significance – is also the root of what makes imagination a liability, being ‘too ready to leap abysses in understanding and argumentation’. Centred around a first-personal account of religious experience, this article steers between the Scylla of constructivist scepticism and the Charybdis of interpretive charity and outlines a three-stage method that brackets doctrine from the account to lessen the tangles of interpretation. I argue that this method illuminates what Karl Jaspers calls the 'immanent transcendent'.

Situating S. T. Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, though it occurs through mainly fumbling, or else over-enthusiastic, human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). As Harvey Wheeler has argued, Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.

This article develops a Coleridgean theory of two main forms of mystical experience occurring at what Coleridge called the poles of our 'Mental Powers', at 'Sense' and 'Reason'. While the article presents a theory of mystical experience as actually or in principle occurrent (depending on the individual) at the perimeter of human experience, it also emphasizes Coleridge's cautions against confusing personal idiosyncrasy for spiritual reality. Coleridge's own position on noetic and on sensual contemplation is argued to develop from his Plotinian reading of and reaction against Kant's philosophy of experience and the limits of knowledge. I show how Coleridge proposes 'Reason' as the space of truth, law, and 'living powers' on the objective side, and of noetic, pure contemplation on the subjective side. Consistent with his polar philosophy, I then develop a theory of what I call inchoate contemplation, occurring at the level of 'Sense', infusing, for some, a bright joy into everyday perception when experienced with extraordinary intensity,  but which may also, especially when exacerbated in fancy, bring darkness and dread. Gentler and more usual than either extreme are the moments of secular grace in nature and quotidian life.

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held values, this process must become reflective. These values have an inescapably ethical dimension, because as we necessarily poetize our surrounding world, we contribute to our personal and communal ethos the character that arises from the culturally shaping power of guiding ideals. Even the immoralist cultivates life within an ethos where obscure feelings connect with some thing or other, whereby certain aims will then appear more valuable than others.

To understand how we cannot help but shape our lives according to dimly or clearly intuited values, I compare Coleridge’s primary imagination, the ‘shaping spirit’ ‘necessary for all human perception’ with Kant’s ‘blind though indispensible function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, yet of which we are scarcely ever conscious’. With Coleridge, we find in imagination an impulse to connect profound but obscure presentiments and ideas with our surroundings. This impulse propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. Whether we pursue merely what attracts us, or seek value beyond this, all lives are freely shaped, without excuses, as the existentialists say, but not always in the most pellucid consciousness. Our choices inevitably engage us in the poetic art of life-writing. Cast in medias res, we necessarily improvise. But this is no argument against lives being moral-aesthetic works, spontaneous compositions in value.

This paper presents an exploratory account of contemplation and meditative experience as found in Coleridge’s ‘Meditative Poems’ and in the nature writing recorded in his notebooks. In these writings, we see the importance of meditative thinking as an exercise concerned with spiritual transformation towards the true, the good, and the beautiful. Sometimes meditation is used as a practical device to stimulate the imagination. At other times it is used as a method to map and
follow a train of thought outside the head, as it were, in the immediate landscape, which process is related to the communing with nature as that Coleridge and Wordsworth pursued. I examine Coleridge’s ‘Meditative Poems’ and notebooks in order to situate his approach to imagination and Idea as applied in his poetic thought.

Coleridge Summer Conference, Jesus College, Cambridge, 6–9 August 2018. 

In an exhilarating passage in a letter to Tom Wedgwood (14 January 1803), Coleridge describes how his ‘spirit careers, drives, and eddies, like a Leaf in Autumn’ as he ascends an alpine road, away from ‘cattle, & the common birds of the woods & fields’, towards ‘hills, & rocks, & steep waters’. Characteristically combining nature writing with psychological observation, the energetic flurries of this restless, wind-blown attitude, are balanced by, and subordinated to, the higher mental energy that for him strains towards ultimate ends and meaningful values.
This paper considers the ‘wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings, and impulses of motion’ as scattered at one level, yet collected within the broader arc of a superordinate idea, namely, the idea of ‘Life’. The mental commotion increases as he ascends beyond biological, ‘animated Nature’, and the inner sense of universal life is matched in geology and ‘steep waters’ with greater force and sublimity than if there were sparrows, people, and cattle around too. I analyze this process into four activities: (1) compensatory balance; (2) a broader intuition of ‘Life’; (3) exertion, uniting the lower energetic to the higher energic; and (4) a consequently excited sense of freedom.

I. Higher-level imperfectionism over petty perfectionism

Previous discussion in aesthetics that has attended to imperfection and perfection work, despite important differences, within a shared assumption of a more-or-less straightforward imperfection–perfection opposition (Ted Gioia 1987, 1988; Andy Hamilton 1990, 2000; Yuriko Saito 1997). In this paper, I will propose a two-level model of imperfectionism and perfectionism in aesthetic creation that has bearing on the different ethoses that the different aesthetics entail.

II. Bill Evans, Sumi-e, and the Restrained Discipline of Time-Bound Art Forms

There is a looseness, especially to certain rhythmic arts such as the blues and improvised jazz, where the aesthetic of aliveness would be damaged if the artist went back and tried to ‘correct’ things. And we can take a broader concept of rhythm that applies to visual and plastic arts, such as Japanese pottery and calligraphy, where the natural flow of movement is an essential feature of the aesthetic. In this section, I suggest that imperfectionism in aesthetics is the disciplined refusal by an artist to return to make a correction. So-called ‘wrong notes’ might be played, or brush strokes made, but they are either left wrong as organic marks of aliveness, or, perhaps more usually, made right by what follows.

III. Insight or Wisdom against the Lower-level ‘Violence of Perfection’

I will then contrast what Byung-Chul Han ([2010] 2015) calls the ‘violence of perfection’, an activity I recast as lower-level perfectionism concerned mainly with imposing homogeneity of pattern, with a higher contemplative passivity, which I argue is a higher-level perfectionism that is equivalent to a traditional sense of wisdom that operates as a benevolent, calm attention in contrast to the lower-level hyperactive attention that has become increasingly prevalent in the digital, inter-hyper-active, mass-media-consuming age.

Coleridge’s water-insect analogy depicts the mind both relaxing on the stream of association, and resisting it with foresight. In this balance, he emphasizes the willed dynamic between passivity and action.
For him, the relationships between (a) ideas intuited after mental exertion; (b) thought willed; and (c) sense perceptions and associations intuited and generated without exertion, involve an agency-within-an-embracing-receptivity. From this perspective, reason is essentially the mind’s reception of its source, the source of phenomena, and the ultimates of contemplation, that is, of laws of nature, truths of mathematics, and ideas constituting the moral sphere. Here, imagination is a dynamic power that mediates between reason and understanding (plus the fancy), and so is both receptive and active.

This reading addresses an inconsistency found in a previous interpretation of the water-insect passage. Thirty years ago, James Engell (1983) read the more passive of the water-insect’s two modes as the primary imagination, which he took to be the mode of ordinary perception. The active state of the water-insect, he continued, would therefore represent the secondary, poetic imagination. This reading is questioned because Coleridge says that between the active and the passive powers lies the intermediate faculty of imagination (Biographia Literaria I 124–5). However, as a faculty comprising primary and secondary imagination, imagination in toto cannot without contradiction be intermediate between primary and secondary imagination. I suggest an alternative sense of the primary imagination by drawing from the ‘order of the Mental Powers’ (Marginalia V 798).

‘Coleridge and the Ordination of Thought’ discusses Coleridge’s ‘Order of the Mental Powers‘ while proposing that Coleridge was neither a pantheist nor a two-worlds theorist (as Kant is usually understood to be) of separationism (as Plato is often interpreted, though Cheyne, with Thesleff,* holds such interpretations to be erroneous). Cheyne proposes that Coleridge was, consistently with his polar philosophy and his theory of the symbol, a two-levels theorist, with higher and lower capable of a communion that emphasizes participation across a fundamental difference that prevents both:

(A) reduction to Unitarian or immanentist levelling, as in Spinozistic or Schellingian pantheism; and

(B) absolute foreclosure, as in two-worlds interpretations of Platonism and as in Kant’s First Critique.

*Holger Thesleff, Studies in Plato’s Two-Level Model, Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1999.

'Stretching to Hear: Coleridge, Contemplation and the Enérgeia of Thought' considers Coleridge as a thinker exploring and communicating the dynamics of thought within an overarching concern for the ‘energies of Reason’ (Statesman’s Manual, 29). Some philosophers might consider Coleridge wrongheaded in attempting to syncretize elements of Empiricist Associationism with Kantian and even Platonic Idealism, but I argue that his was no careless aggregation of contradictory positions, but rather a two-level theory with desire, pleasure, the psychological forces of association, and the more mechanical conceptual understanding working more naturally on the lower level, and the higher understanding, imagination, and the kind of Reason he means as operating beyond the ordinary logic of entailment, a polar logic, working under the recognition of freedom in the higher mind. I consider contemplation as appreciative beholding that first requires the mental energies of attention, stretching to hear with regards to inner focus on Ideas considered as outward objects. This occurs:

When the soul seeks to hear; when all is hush’d, And the Heart listens! (‘Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement’)

There is much written in Coleridge’s letters, nature writings and psychological observations––especially those found in his Notebooks––and much heard too in his poetry, to persuade one of the tireless vitality of the modes of thinking he communicates. I wish to show that restless, flowing and challenging quality of mind as balanced by, and subordinated to, the higher level of intellection that, certainly since 1815, he held as a spiritual conatus straining towards ultimate ends, an intellectual thirst for meaningful values. Like his image in Biographia Literaria of the pond-skater, the water-insect whose passive and active motions represent the opposed powers required for thinking (Biographia I, Ch. 7, 124), the human mind in the Coleridgean view that I present uses, in its ideal operation, the currents of flowing association, pleasure, and fancy, yet also decides when to resist these, or control their flow, for the sake of that ultimate aim towards values worthy of contemplation. This work, the enérgeia towards contemplation, is not itself contemplation. Yet the very possibility of contemplation, however rare or brief its experience, is what gives meaning to a person’s work and play, and all modes of learning and experimentation that precede theoria itself. The enérgeia of thought stands to contemplation––to borrow Coleridge’s words from a Notebook entry of 1807––‘as a fainting and overwearied man runs with violent speed to the place in which he is to rest’.

‘We all have obscure feelings that must be connected with some thing or other’ (Letters II, 768). This creative, life-enhancing impulse to connect profound but dimly-understood impressions and ideas with our surroundings propels great art and everyday aesthetics alike. I introduce the Ars Biographica Poetica as the notion that we all use creative freedom in living and shaping our lives, and that we are consequently engaged in the poetic art of life-writing. Although always in media res, to use Horace’s phrase from Ars Poetica, most efforts at shaping a life resemble fragmentary scribbles, merely preparatory sketches making do with ill-reflected reasons, terrible rhymes, or worse, compulsive or half-hearted repetition. Still, as Coleridge observed, ‘all men are poets in their ways, tho’ for the most part their ways are damned bad ones’ (Letters II, 768).

This paper recommends we understand the art of living as a vital mode of poetic autobiography concrète. It gives a novel reading of Coleridge’s primary imagination as poetizing ordinary experience in bringing values down to earth, and proposes that if Ideas are to mean anything to us, they must be aestheticized by the imagination, which Coleridge understood as the ‘Laboratory in which Thought elaborates Essence into Existence’ (Notebooks II 3158). Thus the Ars Biographica Poetica demands that poetic thought be applied to perception, judgment, consideration and therefore throughout the shaping of one’s life in all its general form, direction, and widely resonating particulars.